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People tend to be in one camp of the other. In my experience once setup the only reboots required (generally) from a Windows server are after having updates applied. Linux servers have generally less patches applied so require less downtime on this front.

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AndyA, thanks for the response. I had heard that the difference was not so much to do with the number of upgrades or patches that were likely to occur on each, but that Lynux activated those upgrades and patches without the need for reboots, much like IBM mainframes do, assuming I am right about what IBM mainframes do.
I am fasinated by how few reboots mainframe hardware requires (almost none) when compared to servers, something like 1 to 48 comparing a single mainframe to a single server in a year. Any thoughts?

I agree Jim, I'm not sure either that linux servers need less patches. The key is that most updates won't require a reboot unless they are kernel updates; and with the help of some tools even kernel security updates can be applied without rebooting.
Windows OSes have historically been known to require reboots for many configuration changes or software installations (and that is a reason to think that a Windows server will require more reboots). Microsoft has considerably improved this in later Windows versions, but this apparently has not been enough to take this too-many-reboots-needed idea out of people's minds.

Koohisan, I assume that that 182 reboot count is for a minimum of four servers since you indicated that you thought the average was 3 to 4 reboots a month on a single server. It is not unusual for a mid to large IT organization to have upwards of 10,000 servers in a data center and at the rate of 48 reboots a year per server that is 480,000 reboots a year. If you assume every reboot (Minus count of failovers) is a disruption to the corporate computing system then you understand the impact of servers on the stability of the corporate system. Compare a single server to a single mainframe, RAID storage or a network device and you get an average ratio of more than 48 to 1 per server. That means in one year a server is 48 times more likely to cause a disruption of the corporate system than say an EMC RAID storage device or a Cisco router. Now remember that servers are 90+% of all the hardware units on the corporate system and you have almost all the disruptions on that corporate system coming from servers. This is why failover is becoming so important. Where mainframes, Raid storage units and network devices failover internally, servers can't. They don't contain the backup internal components, nor can those failed internal components be replaced without stopping the hardware, nor does the operating system permit upgrades or patches to be activated with out restarting. Carlosdl seemed surprised by you high count of reboots, but you both should keep in mind that they way to compute any hardware units impact on the corporate system is to count the reboots of that unit minus the count of failovers on that unit. 48 reboots a year minus 48 failovers a year on the same unit means that unit had no negative impact on the stability of the corporate system.

In my case it was an average for just two servers. No failover whatsoever. When they are down, you just have certain tasks you can't do (check email, authenticate to AD, access file shares). Those things just stop until the server is back up and running again. :(

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